Cannot update new skeleton rigging

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hello.

I have imported a rigged character into UE5 from Blender with its animations. I did everything is supposed to be done:

  1. Click on the mesh and the armature
  2. Include “Selected objects”
  3. Set proper scales
  4. Geometry: Face and Apply Modifiers
  5. Check “Only deform bones” and uncheck “Add Leaf bones”
  6. And for the last, check the animations

Correct me if I am wrong with the previous steps.

The thing is, in UE5 I already did blueprints for NPCs that use that skeletal mesh. But the keyshapes I did in Blender were not being imported properly. I did a lot of things yesterday in order to make them work. What I did was:

  1. The control rig of the keyshape was not a deform bone, I checked it as a deform bone.
  2. Also, the control rig was outside the root hierarchy, I put it inside and the root as the parent.
  3. I changed the name and update the driver properly. The animations still looking good in blender.

But now, here comes the problem and the headache. How to properly update a skeletal mesh and the skeleton in UE5, because when I try to reimport the .fbx, it says que bones couldn’t be merged. The animations get duplicated for some reason, and the most strange thing is that not all animations are being imported now. Only some of them, and I don’t know why. Maybe is because altering the hierarchy affects to some animations. I don’t know.

If you need something specifc for my project I can take pictures. Thanks in advance.

2

Altering the hierarchy aside from adding additional child bones will break everything. These sorts of headaches are why I weight to the epic skeleton and do the animations in engine with control rig. Unreal imports blender’s deform bones as actual bones, which can alter the hierarchy.

If shapekeys aren’t showing after import, make sure you aren’t applying modifiers on export. Applying Subdivision or other modifiers on export clears/deletes your shape keys, particularly if the modifier alters vertex count. Applying visual geometry to mesh after posing also clears your shape keys.

If you need to apply modifiers to a mesh with shape keys, use SKKeeper before exporting. If that doesn’t work, try clearing the reference to the skeletal mesh from the blueprint, delete the skeletal mesh and skeleton, and import it again.

Good Luck.

1 Like
3

Thanks a lot for this response.

At the end I started from scratch, but now I know that if I want to rig a character I should do it inside UE5